It's not easy to be Stephen Elop these days. After Nokia, the biggest phone manufacturer in the world, shook the mobile community with the announcement it's to make Windows Phone its "principal smartphone strategy", waves of joy, sadness and sheer bewilderment were registered.

Nokia's shares fell 25%, and a "a group of nine young Nokia shareholders" demanded the "immediate discharge of Stephen Elop from his duties as President and CEO of the company", as well as a return to MeeGo as the principal future platform of the company, and prolonging the lifespan of Symbian OS to "a minimum of 5 years".

This group, which called itself Nokia Plan B, already gave up, because "the responses that we received from institutional investors were not encouraging". Nevertheless, it's reported that their ideas found a sizeable support (you can read the group's manifesto if you follow the first link below), which spells trouble for Elop come May 3, when Nokia's Annual General Meeting for shareholders takes place.

To make things even worse for Nokia, the Finnish trade union Pro announced it's demanding €100,000 for every Nokia employee who is given the sack (in Finland) because of the new Nokia strategy. The union calculates that up to 25% of all Nokia employees (said to be 20 000 in total) in the Scandinavian country may lose their jobs in the near future.

Things are not looking rosy for Stephen Elop at the moment, eh? But, anyway, do you think this Nokia-Microsoft partnership will pay off in the long run?

10 Comments

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1.and1one66 (unregistered)

Hmm, me thinks that Stephen made a wrong move by choosing WP7 as its primary OS. Maybe he should make it as one of its OS, but not proclaiming it as its primary. He should think first that Nokia, more than a year ago, made a union to Intel, which is the MeeGo now, and Stephen should improve it, but not discard it and allowing another OS to introduce again. And one more thing that making it worse is Symbian will become an obsolete OS by the near future.

This is sad Nokia, I hope you continue MeeGo and Symbian (and S40 too), even if you have WP7.

2.Sinto (unregistered)

I used to be a Nokia fan and Symbian S60 and used windows mobile. With more than give years with symbian, I regret to hear Nokia partner with microsoft. Symbian is good in performance. Most symbian phones have very low hardware specs but they run smoothly. CPU is generally less than 400mhz and RAM is less than 200mb. I think with improvement of its UI and higher specs like 1ghz processor and 512mb, I bet Nokia will be back to business.

3.Bongky (unregistered)

Nokia adopting WP 7 is definitely the right thing to do. Symbian is losing a lot of interest among the general public. Seeing how WP 7 is getting a lot of support from the public, Stephen Elop made the best decision to adopt WP 7. Nokia share may fall 25% but once the first WP 7 handset makes it to the market, the share price of Nokia will easily go up again, given the interest shown by the public towards Nokia WP7. Kudos Elop.

MeeGo was laggy. No matter from which angle you look at it, its laggy. The same applies for Symbian. Don't let fanboism blind you. Open your eyes! I own a N82 and yes, I've tried the N8. One word, CRAP! I was wondering why Nokia didn't abandon Symbian when iOS and Android made it to the market. Even now, Symbian devices are depleting by the huge margin, even in Asia market.

5.gregory (unregistered)

sorry man but you wrote nonsenses:
1-,,Symbian is losing a lot of interest among the general public"-why? Because on forums android funs screams as soon as any info about symbian apperars?
2-Seeing how WP 7 is getting a lot of support from the public-LOL no comments
3-MeeGo was laggy-heh i thought that this system will be introduced in 3 quarter of 2011!.....
4-I own a N82 and yes, I've tried the N8. One word, CRAP! Maybe crap but take a look at specs and possibilities which symbian 3 gives you and compare them to specs of ANY android phone. Any conclusions ?
Sometimes i think that better idea is to give people an empty shell with limited functionality and call it ,,lower version" :)

I would have to agree with Bongky on this one. Symbian was a great product at one time, but has, as of late, lost its edge and has failed to remain innovative. WP7 wouldnt have been my first choice in operating system, but Elop is making a smart choice here. A choice that is probably going to keep Nokia both in buisness and on the profitable side of competitive

Best case scenario means that Nokia will be integrated into Microsoft completely, so yes for Microsoft it looks very promising. I mean just about everything in this "partnership" involves Nokia ceding their wireless assets to Microsoft and giving control of their future to Microsoft. Will microsoft keep Nokia alive with it's financing you mean; well yes that's the point in this deal: $MONEY$. That is until they have full control of Nokia's shares; in which then they will move for a non-hostile take over. And if Nokia doesn't yield results with their Windows Phone OS strategy, then Microsoft will simply buy them out when their share prices take a dive. See: win win situation for Microsoft anyway you look at it. Why else would you form such an unique "partnership" if the end goal wasn't to assimilate Nokia's vast IP?

TO WHOM EVER WANTS TO KNOW THE TRUTH:

This isn't a partnership to save NOKIA. It's a partnership to assimilate NOKIA into Microsoft's fold. And some might be ok with this, but I like many others will not! I like having Symbian in my phone because it has access to a little bit of everyone else without yielding to Google's information Data Collections, Apple's Controlled environment, Windows over simplistic new OS, Blackberries outdated OS, and even WebOS that insists on using teeny tiny keyboards!

I've had a 2010 top spec phone with Symbian, and I hated it. Symbian's expensive "signed" developer certificates freeze out most small developers. So there's few open source, free or really low priced apps, and when you do find a nice one, and the guy actually paid to get it signed, after a year, the cert is already expired and again, you're stymied at installing what you want on it. (a simple ebook reader in this case)
Eventually, I had to hack the phone, just like I'd have to do with an iPhone.
And Microsoft? They're not one bit different. As soon as they get a leg up, they'll be the biggest jerks about locking everything down, and their development pace will get as glacial as it got with browsers and the old Windows Mobile, which they refused to fix for what, like 10 years?

Android is the only system, where you don't have to fight the vendor every inch of the way. As for the "data collections" Rafael was concerned about... thats quite optional, you don't have to use any of those google services if you don't like it.

I'll just remind you, that Googlemail doesn't delete all your emails after you don't log in for a month, like Microsoft and Yahoo does. And Google does need to make some money too, even though they like to give us useful stuff for free.

Fathom that Google is a company where making money is NOT the ONLY goal they have. They actually do all sorts of useful projects, like digitizing all the old books for free dispersion. They pay for the digitizing, the datacenters, the bandwidth for you or anyone to download them. I know, a lot of old money's gotta hate that, free education for anyone from any country in the world.

Since Google shares its wealth, I don't mind them making money with targeted advertising, they ALL do that now anyway... Apple, Microsoft - why do you think MS spent a lot of money on finally breaking into the search business with bing? They all want a toll booth to sit in, ripping us for pennies at a time, all day long.

Here's how Android app certificates work:
the Developer signs them themselves, after registering with google.
The cert is good for a minimum of 25 years
The cert costs nothing.

what does that mean for the user?

As a user, I can install and reinstall as often and for as long as I need.
I can upgrade or keep the old version as I please.
Small developers that just wrote some neat thing over the weekend, that solves something also useful to you, are not prevented from sharing what they made.

So, unlike Symbian, there's no built-in bias towards large developers, insulating them from small shop competition, making available apps more expensive, yet with less features, due to lack of competition.

so, before, I didn't buy nokia phones beceause of Symbian,
even if I liked the hardware...
Now, I won't buy nokia because of Winphone7,
even if I like the hardware...
I won't buy apple's shatterphone because of iOS
even though the hardware is cute...

I would look at nokia phones with meego on them, even thought the name is awful.

But what the telcos really would like to sell is winphone7.

I went into a store the other day:
me: "hi, I'd like to see any new Android phones you have available"
sales guy: "oh you should check out this new windows phone, its soooo easy to use!"
me: "I don't want a windows phone, I don't need a tiny dictator on my device"
sales guy: "but look at the great social integration, u got facebook right here!"
me: "I don't want random facebook contacts mixed in with my phonebook."
sales guy: "you should really give it a chance..."
me: "can I see your Android phones now?"
sales guy: sighs, walks me to a different shelf...
me: "you guys get special bonuses for selling Windows phones? Or is there some company directive to steer customers away from android?"
sales guy: "we just had a training course on the advantages of windowsphone7"
me: "did you have a course on android phones too?"
sales guy: "no..."

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